Thursday, 15 April 2010

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior and are disgraced by the inferior. - George Bernard Shaw

There are 327 million entries on Google for ‘great book title’, 166 million for ‘what makes a great book title’ and 82.5 million entries for ‘how to write a great book title’. That’s why this blog has the rather boring title ‘What makes a great book title?’ because I’m looking to maybe snag a few of the people who are obviously interested in finding a catchy title for their book. ‘Catchy book titles’ would bring up 88.6 million entries by the way and the only reason for this introductory paragraph is to use these keywords as much as I can because all of this makes a difference to the spiders that crawl over all our sites all the time looking for new content.

Now we’re done with all that let’s get started. The real title of this post is:

Do you come here often?

It’s a line. I seriously wonder if it’s used any more. Then again, using a cripplingly obvious cliché like that can actually work wonders if you have the right comeback to, “You cannot be serious!” The chat-up like is something that takes real skill to master. I am not one of them. A line, however, is no good without a hook and some bait. You’re looking for a response so that you can reel them in:

I have had a really bad day and it always makes me feel better to see a pretty girl smile. So, would you smile for me?

Pardon me miss, I seem to have lost my phone number, could I borrow yours?

Of course a chat-up line is a form of advertising. The more blatant you are, even if you’re clever, the less chance you have. The best lines are often cryptic. Incidentally there are 25.4 million sites devoted to chat-up lines. There are so many, the majority of which are bad, but every now and then you come across one that might just word, for example:

Hi. I suffer from amnesia. Do I come here often?

Okay, it’s still not good but it shows initiative. You’ve added a twist to an old favourite. It might buy you a witty response rather than a sarcastic one and that’s all it needs to do. If you’re lucky your chat-up line will have turned into a pick-up line. If you’re very, very lucky. But then it takes all sorts.

Book titles are pick-up lines, They’re crying out to passersby: “Pick me up! No, not that one over there. Me. Me. Pick up me. I’ll make it worth your while. We don’t even need to see each other when you’re done with me. You can toss me back on the shelf and you’ll never have to worry about me calling you up and being all desperate on the phone. Just pick me up. Please!”

If you heard all that from a book, seriously, would you pick it up? No? Me neither. I’m looking for a book with a bit of class. I don’t much care for the hard sell. Whenever I go into a shop and a smarmy salesperson sidles up beside me then I can guarantee I’ll be out of there in two shakes of a jiffy.

So, what makes a great title? (See that’s me cunningly slipping in my keywords there.) The real answer is: It depends. The real problem is getting your title in front of your potential customer. You could be sitting in Wembley Stadium with another 89,999 people and the girl of your dreams could be sitting in the stand opposite, straight in your line of vision but what’s the chance of you seeing her, let alone managing to bump into her? A snowball’s chance in hell I’d say. The Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood carries 100 thousand books and from the photos it doesn’t look so big but that’s a lot of books whatever way you look at it. Go online and you’re looking at 100 million+ (that’s the figure AbeBooks quotes).

The trick is getting your title to stand out. (Let’s forget covers for the moment.) How does one do that? Are there are rules worth considering?

A title is not just important, it’s crucial. It has a tremendous amount of work to do in a fraction of a second. Consider how fast you scan books either online or in a bookshop. I would actually suggest that online is slower. The facts show that we read 25% slower onscreen and as far as book titles go we’re never simply faced with a shelf of spines. It’s scary how quickly I scan bookshelves. I’m a little informavore, scurrying around the shelves trying to sniff out something tasty to read and every now and then I’ll stop and snatch something from a shelf for a closer look.

Now, I don’t usually go into bookshops unless I’m looking to buy a present and frankly most of the time I buy all of them online but here are three books I bought for my wife, my daughter and my wife’s daughter:

Each of them proved to be a perfect buy and all of them went on to read everything each author had written. The thing is, when I look at what sites online recommend I have to wonder why I made these particular choices.

Keep It Short. Your book title should portray a message but not be too long as to bore the potential reader. It should of a length that can be read at a glance and require no time at all for it to register with the brain. Short and simple works best.

It’s been suggested that no more than three words works best, certainly no more than six. Short, sharp and to the point, e.g. Robert Ludlum's thrillers have three-word titles: The Bourne Identity, The Matarese Circle, The Rhinemann Exchange. The other word that keeps cropping up when you think about title is catchy. You want a title that doesn’t simply attract but one that stays with you. A catchy tune sticks in your head. Think of a catchphrase. Every time you hear it, if it’s a good one, it evokes good feelings. It’s a childish thing. My daughter when she was wee would often say to me: “Do it again. Do it again,” and I’d do whatever it was again and no sooner had I done it then she wanted it again; there’s pleasure in the familiar which is why we love it when Bruce Forsyth manages to slip one or two into his shows, in fact we’re waiting for them. A good title is something we don’t mind hearing over and over again, like:

which does nothing for me frankly. I’ve not read either book. I have had a copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in my hand, a couple of times. I think Carrie may have a copy and I’ve heard it’s readable so I may get to it someday. It will be a cold day in hell when I go looking for a Single White Vampire. It may well be a decent book. The first two must have made a profit or we wouldn’t be onto a third book but the title is so off-putting.

There are other things a title should be if you have any chance of getting a total stranger to check it out. It should be compelling, intriguing and different. I think all of the three books I mentioned above meet those criteria but they don’t have short titles. I’m not against short titles but it’s like dot-coms, all the cool ones have been snapped up.

Some people think that a good title should suggest what the content of the book will be. Now, that’s fine with non-fiction books like:

but I think that can work against a work of fiction. There are things you can do that will make the title click with your reader and that’s use expressions that suggest theme or genre. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time does that. It evokes the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle which is where we also get:

sadly only available in an edition for the Kindle. So we know it’s a mystery in just the same way as we know that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is going to be a mystery even though neither tells us anything of significance about the books; there’s probably a dog in the first one and someone called Benjamin Button in the second. Not very helpful.

I’ve just watched a delightful little film called Cashback. What do you think it’s about? It’s actually about an art student who one day discovers he can stop time. The words “cash back” only appear a couple of times in the film, once, when he talking about getting paid, you work and you get cash back; the second is when a girl at the till asks a customer if, after paying with a debit card, he wants any cash back. Other than that that’s it. Not a very good title but a most watchable little film, a “real film” as my wife calls them. Why didn’t he call it The Boy Who Could Stop Time? There are plenty of books and films that have The Boy Who... as a title:

The Boy Who...

Harnessed the Wind, Knew Too Much, Invented Christmas, Invented Skiing, Cried Wolf, Cried Horse, Cried Fabulous, Cried Bigfoot, Grew Flowers, Saw True, Could Fly, Flew, Could Fly Without a Motor, Flew Through Windows, Fell Out of the Sky, Dared, Listened, Would Live Forever, Loved Windows, Loved Tornadoes, Had (Nearly) Everything, Was Always Late, Changed the World, Would be Shakespeare, Would be a Helicopter, Fell into a Book, Became a Legend, Sued the Pope, Followed Ripley, Saved Baseball, Saved the World, Who Didn’t Want to Save the World, Loved Books, Taught the Beekeeper to Read, Could Make Himself Disappear, Loved Anne Frank, Was 84, Dared to Rock, Climbed into the Moon, Lost His Face, Would Never Grow Up, Would be King (Who Was), Was Wanted Dead or Alive – or Both, Got Caught Up in a War, Shot Down an Airship, Haunted Himself, Couldn’t Stop Washing, Built the Boat, Would Not Go to Sea, Sailed with Blake, Set Sail on a Questionable Quest, Went to Sea and Came Back a Man, Returned from the Sea, Was Raised as a Dog, Spoke Dog, Went Ape, Was a Bear, Kicked Pigs, Didn’t Give In, Didn’t Believe in Spring, Dreamed of Cars, Made a Dragonfly, Loved to Draw, Wouldn’t go to Bed, Did Not Like Television, Wouldn’t Share, Drank too Much, Made His Way, Had His own Way, Lost His Birthday, Ran to the Woods, Lost his Bellybutton...

You get the idea.

Many authors go for plays on words, expressions that make you do a double take: The Sprouts of Wrath, A History of the World in 10½ Chaptersor The Toyminator. The other popular trick is to pick an expression that will ring a bell but change the context. Loads of authors have pinched titles from Shakespeare for example. I had Agatha Christie pencilled in at the worst offender but Aldous Huxley pips her to post with seven titles purloined from the Bard’s work, Brave New World(from The Tempest – Miranda: O brave new world, That has such people in't!) but these days who would associate it first with Shakespeare; it has become its own thing and who is to say who the authors of the following were thinking of when they wrote:

Although Huxley denied it, it’s obvious that he must have been influenced in writing Brave New World by coming across the book We by the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin; Orwell couldn’t deny it since he reviewed the book in 1946 and Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. We, of course, takes the idea of a punchy title to its extreme one would think, the one word (in fact the one syllable) title. Again there have been many of these and all the good ones have been used up:

I have no doubt that I’ll have missed a few but I think my point has been made.

One of the things you want is a title that’s easy to remember. It’s one thing having a title that’s not dull but finding one that’s appropriate to the content and satisfies all the other criteria I’ve listed is not going to be easy. Probably the hardest single criterion though has to be be original. When it comes to titles that is never going to be easy especially if you write in a subgenre like vampire stories. Seriously, how many books do you think have ‘blood’ in the title?

Cold Blood, In Cold Blood, The Coldest Blood, Hot Blood, There Will be Blood, Wire in the Blood, Book of Blood, Throne of Blood, Theatre of Blood, First Blood, Ebony Blood, Streets of Blood, Flesh and Blood, Blue Blood, Innocent Blood, Wise Blood, Brotherhood of Blood, Captain Blood, Baron Blood, Cauldron of Blood, The House that Dripped Blood, A Bucket of Blood, Castle of Blood, Bay of Blood, Satan’s Blood, I Drink Your Blood, Corridors of Blood, Camp Blood, Illusion of Blood, Baby Blood, Mixed Blood, Wise Blood, Bad Blood, Lips of Blood, Queen of Blood, Kiss My Blood, Brain of Blood, Dark Blood, Divine by Blood, Traitor’s Blood, Dog Blood, Tunnels of Blood, Cadian Blood, A Taint in the Blood, A Question of Blood, Precious Blood, In the Blood, Heart’s Blood, Summer of Blood, Roman Blood, Brotherhood of Blood, Blood and Mistletoe, Fire in the Blood, Dragon Blood, Distant Blood, Vienna Blood, Field of Blood, The Sweet Scent of Blood, April Blood, The Parliament of Blood, The Field of Blood, Written in Blood, One Blood,

Just a thought: what happens if a vampire turns a guy who’s already a werewolf? Does he become a werevamp? Do you realise there’s no book out there called The Werevamp or The Vampwolf? Get scribbling right now why don’t you?

Okay, okay, not all books above are about vampires, they’re not even all horror novels, but once a title’s gone it’s gone. Only it’s not. If you want to call your next book The Dark Side of the Moon you can(although it’s already been done – twice, not counting the non-fiction) but what would be the point? The same goes for all the Brave New... books – what does the title really tell you about the content? Now, Anthony Burgess’s1985 was a touch of genius as far as I’m concerned. I can’t imagine anyone not picking it up if only to see who had the nerve to write a sequel (not that it is) but then it’s job has been done – the book is in your hand and it’s time for the blurb to start and earn its keep.

My question is: Is that last question important? The purpose of a title is to make you investigate further. Usually it’s sitting on an attractive cover that should do the rest of the work but not all cover art is worth much. Take When I Was Five I Killed Myself as an example. My copy has a red cover with the title on it and the author’s name and that is it and yet my review of the book is one of my most read posts. I investigated it – I first heard of it in someone’s list in Amazon – purely based on the title which, to be honest, although the words do appear in the book, has little to do with the main story and if you didn’t read the entire first chapter you’d cope just fine. But it reels readers in.

The title here may be a bit on the long side (if you’re going to stick by the rules) but it has something else: sound appeal. Would The Great Gatsby have done as well had F. Scott Fitzgerald stuck with his original title of: Trimalchio in West Egg? How about The Eyre Affair or The Wee Free Men? I think titles like that have a much greater chance of being remembered than say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. My wife and I went to see that when it came out and every time we went to tell someone about it we couldn’t get the name right, my wife especially. (Side note: in her perversity I asked her just now and she got it first time.) She couldn’t remember The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover; this time she suggested The Boy, The Cook, His Knife and His Mother. Not bad.

I think names make rotten titles. And yet people insist on using them, Jilly Cooper being at the top of that list of offenders with:

Octavia, Harriet, Bella, Prudence, Imogen, Pandora, Emily, Lisa & Co

Then, of course, we have the made-up names, for example:

Abhorsen, Sabriel, Aenir, Lirael,Perelandra, Iorich, Idoru,Assegai,

These aren’t titles, they’re labels. And if you look at the covers all you’ll see is a picture of a beautiful woman. But, you see, what sells these books are not the titles but the author’s name. The same goes for anyone who has made the bestseller list. J. K. Rowling could call her next book Smrvkinstroudnvest’s Pink Borgulshart and it would sell millions. It wouldn’t even matter if Smrvkinstroudnvest never even appeared in the book. The rest of us don’t have that luxury. We have to consider our titles carefully.

All Rowling’s Harry Potter books begin with Harry Potter and the... – it’s become her trademark. That’s another thing you have to think about when you know you have a series of books in you (or already written). My first novel is called Living with the Truth. I could’ve called it The Old Man and the Truth (I mean The Old Man and the Seawas good enough for Hemingway) but I didn’t. I didn’t have a title right away when I started the sequel but I could’ve chosen something like Nothing but the Truth or Dead to the Truth to try and keep the character’s name in the title. Instead I went with Stranger than Fiction with its implied “The Truth is...” at the beginning; the expression is so well known that I could get away with it. There’s built in familiarity. As it is, there are books (and a film) using all four titles now in existence. My titles have a lot to do with the content but I wonder when Sue Grafton wrote A is for Alibi she already had B is for Burglar in mind? And since she’s just published U is for Undertow I also wonder if she’s starting to worry about where’s she’s going after Z? Since Hitchcock had already done Dial M for Murder I was curious to see what her choice was. It was actually M is for Malice which left Neil Gaiman free to use M is for Magic.

I have to say I like titles like this. Every time I see a new one I think: Damn! I wish I’d thought of that. I do have a poem called ‘Armageddonitis’. It’s not a very good poem but it is a good title.

One thing I never use is a working title. I try titles out but I’ve never struggled giving my books titles; they all seemed quite obvious to me. Whether they’re the best titles I could have chosen is another thing but they do meet many of the criteria I’ve mentioned above.

The good thing – really the amazing thing – is that authors are still coming up with unique and interesting titles. Considering all the ones that have been used already – and we’re talking millions – I’m not sure even ‘amazing’ covers it. Let me leave you with a few titles that would (or have) stopped me in my tracks. You will doubtless have a few of your own.

One needs a bit of a fun post every now and then, Lis, lest we start to take ourselves too seriously. Marketing annoys me. I know it’s a necessary evil but that doesn’t stop it annoying me. It annoys me when products that I’ve known all my life get a name change. Marathon is a good example. It’s now called Snickers. Why? There is actually a petition to bring back the original name.

Things go the other way. The film Encino Man was called California Man when it was released over here. Neither title is really helpful. It’s the picture of a thawed-out caveman on the cover that tells you what the film’s premise is. And Howard the Duck was renamed Howard: A New Breed of Hero. Again, I ask, why? Almost the only people who would go and see the film would own copies of the comic which is about a duck called Howard by the way.

I can’t say I don’t think about titles because I do especially book titles. I had always imagined that my first poetry collection would be called Reader, Please Supply Meaning and I’ve never wavered from that for years but here I am bringing out a collection called This is Not About What You Think which, again, was not my first choice – I was going to go with The Poetry of Regrets - but once you have all the poems together it’s obvious what the title should be even though the point is still the same, it’s the book’s readers who will decide what it means and what that will be will be very different what the poems mean to me.

Hey, I worked in marketing for years, and I don't like it either. Self-marketing as an artist or writer is a necessary evil; I don't claim to be very good at it.

Titles often come last, for me. They are a summation of the content; although sometimes they are the summation that kick-starts the writing of the contents. When I'm stuck for a title of a poem, I have sometimes pulled out one of the most memorable phrases from within the poem, and used that for a title. I haven't written fiction in 30 years, and have no plans to ever again, so maybe my comments are irrelevant here. (While I like telling a story, I don't actually enjoy writing fiction. Too much baggage of assumptions around what fiction's supposed to be.)

I do agree that a title is what pulls you in. It also needs to set or reflect the tone. A silly title on a serious book is not very good, for example; or vice versa. A title sets you up for what to expect. It leads you in, and hopefully catches your attention.

A lot of writers, though, are not very good at titles—and so the editor or the publisher has given the memorable title to the work. I think working titles are great if they end up being the actual title—that principal I mentioned above of writing to the summary idea I mentioned above. But a lot of the time, titles come very last in the process.

First, are there really spiders that scan blogs for new ideas? Really? Do you have evidence, stories about that?

I love good words and great word combinations. Sometimes I start with the title first. My stageplay, Unbearable Pleasures was begun because I just had to use it somehow (are spiders going to steal that now?).

Did you know I actually tried to click on your emboldened informavore to see if it linked to anything?

I have always maintained that google is hugely successful largely because of its name. Yahoo just doesn't feel as good in the mouth.

I do, occasionally, get a title before anything else, Art, but it’s rare especially with poetry. With them the title is the last thing I think about but with prose usually the title comes naturally as I’m working on a piece. Although this was a bit of a fun post I do think it’s an area that we all could work on especially the titles for our blog posts. I used to try and be witty and interesting but it really does seem that the best thing is to call a spade a spade just to get potential readers through the door. One of my most successful posts has the title “Why I hate love poetry” and I’m still getting hits on that post. It’s the “love poetry” keyword that’s doing the work and then, once the thing is in their line of vision, then we rope ‘em in with something clever.

And web spiders, Kass, go by a variety of names, web crawlers, bots, automatic indexers and worms. Whatever you call them they are software agents that traverse the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. Here’s an article on the subject. It’s how the search engines gather information. And here’s a link for Informavore since I missed one. (Can’t believe I missed that one.)

Interesting, don’t you think, that both Google and Yahoo both have oo’s in their names. There must be something in that.

Don't drop by here nearly often enough. Very funny, and interesting, post though I have to confess I want to read Single White Vampire now.All the books I really love have exactly the right title. Now, why is that?

Jim - I love this posting - great fun. I love giving things titles - books, photographs. I always wanted to name a book 'a note about the type.' It's always stuck there in the end of the book - seems such a shame. I also loved writing fake tabloid headlines, until the real ones became more bizarre than imaginable.

I've long thought that Sue Grafton's 27th book would be called 'A1 is for Steak' but I don't know if A1 steak sauce (from the US) translates well around the English speaking world.

I've only named one real book I've written and from the title I can only assume it must have been about radioactive flooring.

Thanks for this. It was a wonderful read - I think the spiders went home happy with what they found here today. I'm looking forward to 'this is not about what you think'

Well, my door is always open, Titus. And, of course, you’ve fallen into my trap. Yes, I have shares in Single White Vampire.

And Koe, sorry, ‘A1 steak sauce’ is completely unknown over here. ‘HP’ is the big sauce in the UK especially their tomato sauce. That’s another thing that we need to think about when naming things, we’re now marketing to the whole world.

Titles are mysterious, aren't they? It's a total marketing ploy perhaps, the notion of a personal universe...what I man is you have titles that speak out to you like some metaphysical experience. Titles that attract you, seduce you, appear to have some special meaning to you, which you relate to persona experience, but really titles are just templates of word embossed on the front of a book to incite you.

A good title has this quality I think. It seems to relate to you personaly. This isn't always the case. But something eccentric or synchronous.

Bukowski has a nack for great long titles of poetry books, like: 'The days run away like wild horses over the hills' or 'What matters most is how well you walk through the fire', and I love them, such insightful and simple lines that charm and intrigue - give you and image and some poetic insight.

'One hundred years of solitude' is a title I love; it's so profound in a ridiculous way, hyperbolic, but intriguing - solitude is such a potent word - personal solitude, cultural solitude, solitude of a village...poginant. I read it and think - 'solitude' in every sense, the solitude of the world, the solitude of the infintismal individuals of lives surrounding us, that can't catch onto.

James Ellroy's memoir - My Dark Places. That rattled me. I was like - I want to know his dark places, where do they come from, what shape do they take. What does he say of my dark places, do other people have dark places? Everyone has dark places. What are pathological shadows all about? Dark places blow my mind wide open.

As you can see, I read quite a bit into titles....it's provokes you or gives some insight, which you often supply yourself.

I chose my title early for my latest WIP - god knows what I'll do if I have to change it - the whole book will unravel....I have changed the title of another novel and had loads more interest in it from publishers as a result (well, I think that's the reason!)

It's a key part of the falling in love business. I once kissed a boy named Jordan - he was beautiful in A WEIRD and quirky way. The magic faded when I found out he was called Gordon.

I think that’s the whole point, McGuire, that the title should mean something to you and only you. And that’s the x factor, the je ne sais quoi, that marketers can’t predict. All they can do is try and work out what they did right and try and do it next time. Only next time we go, “Seen that before.” The amazing thing is that people keep coming up with new and interesting titles after all these years. I remember when PIL brought out ‘This is Not a Love Song’ thinking, Why has no one ever done this before? So simple.

And, Rachel, very good point. There was a girl who went through Primary School with me called Catherine and she smelled and for years I found I prejudged people called Catherine even though I knew there was no rhyme or reason behind the prejudgement; I simply couldn’t help myself. In recent years one of my closest friends was called Kathryn.

I’m the same as you with my current WIP. The title is the key. I would fight tooth and nail to keep it.

About Me

I am a 58-year-old Scottish writer. I was a poet for twenty years before I stumbled into novel writing. I’m currently getting my fifth novel ready for publication and have two novellas and a second short story collection waiting in the wings.